1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to automatic printing systems in general, and more particularly to an unattended printing system which automatically prints pages in accordance with an operator entered line count and in the event that there is not enough text to fill a page, automatically indexes the page to be beginning of the next page to align the first line of the next page for an unattached printing operation.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the context that unattended printing is used in the present application, there has been no true unattended printing system in the prior art. That is, in the prior art systems that unattended printing was usually that of fixed format letters and the format itself was relatively invariable. That is, unattended printing applications were generally limited to printing a form letter over and over and with the only variation in the unattended printing being the change in the name and address of, for instance, an addressee. To change the letter or format, operator intervention was required. That is, in the prior art unattended printing systems such as with a Magnetic Tape "Selectric" Typewriter carriage returns would have to be recorded on the magnetic media itself to cause indexing of the paper to be beginning of the new line on the next page. Thus, the operator would have to record the letter initially and determine how many carriage returns would be required to cause proper indexing for each of the letters. This process of prior recording was obviously relatively unwieldy and time consuming. In addition, if the margins on the machine which was being used for playout were changed such that more or less lines of text per page resulted, the recording of carrier returns based upon a different line length would cause inaccurate indexing of the paper. Thus, ideally a system was needed in which the operator could initially record a document with any line length and the printing system could accept this recorded text and provide accurate indexing at another line length and automatically cause the pages to be properly indexed in accordance with this new line length without any type of operator intervention.